Innovation—not for the weak
This is the first in a three part series by University of Minnesota student Steve Mullaney, examining a recent trip that he took to North Carolina to observe the student group and non-profit Nourish International (NI) www.nourishinternational.org. The second part will look at the culture NI built around engagement, and the third will look at the implementation of exciting new ideas.
I’m on a million mailing lists.
There are days when I actually believe this and am sure that they deliver solicitations for money to my apartment in a dump truck. Or a tank.
Unlike most people, I read all of my mail. As a college student I’m always hopeful that the free gift is a car and not just mailing labels with my name misspelled. So I was very excited to peruse Heifer International’s magazine Noah’s Ark. I really like the model of sharing livestock that Heifer uses; it seems sustainable, plays to the strength of community partners, and just seems cool.
As I paged through the magazine an article caught my eye: “UNC Students Fight Hunger on Their Lunch Break� which described how students raised money to fight poverty and hunger with a lunch that everyone threw in a little for. A month ago I guest-posted about how community engagement worked gathering people around meals. Naturally, this idea appealed to me; I maneuvered over to NI's website with the idea of learning as much as possible. Fortunately they’re incredibly user friendly and I quickly made contact with the organization—and within a day they responded.
SCOPE, a student group that I’m a part of, had the funds to send me to North Carolina for a week, and I spent two days observing NI and how they functioned. In short, NI is an incredible source for innovation. But innovation (as my title suggests) is not for the weak.
Innovation requires people to admit that they do not know everything and that they should be open to new ideas. In spirit this is easy—but in practice we fall into set patterns of the-way-we-always-do-things (TWWADT™). Frequently, innovation only happens when TWWADT™ isn’t working; the challenge for those engaging communities is how to strive for constant improvement.
Ultimately, innovation is not a one-time only slate of new ideas, but rather a way of going about work. One of NI’s strengths is the way that it naturally renews its leadership by giving younger members the opportunity to take ownership of the process and ventures they undertake. They make sure to have seniors act as advisors, not leaders, encouraging younger students to take an active role This year they even started a Freshman Executive position to give first year students the skills necessary to lead over the next three years. Giving up control is scary: intuitively I feel like I need to hold on to things that I’m leading. However, when that happens there’s a limit to what can be achieved. Especially for student groups at the undergraduate level a constant reenergizing is necessary to avoid staleness and burnout. The only way that I know how to do this is to lay a foundation in the hopes that those who come after can build it higher. Innovation isn’t for the weak-stomached, but it’s sure a lot better than stagnation.